Recently, when a printer is used in an office or a school, it becomes a general practice to use an employee ID card or a student ID card as an authentication medium for the purpose of preventing left printed matter, improving security and enabling charges. Specifically, after transmitting a print job to a server from a PC, a user goes to a place of the printer to instruct the printing by putting the employee ID card to the printer. The printer which receives the print instruction obtains the print job data of the user from the server based on the user ID read from the employee ID card, and prints out the data.
However, in a situation where a plurality of printers are connected to a server, there is such a case that, when a user goes to the place of a nearest printer, the printer is executing printing for another user. In such a situation, it is difficult for the user to determine, in order to start his print job faster, whether he should wait for the finish of the print by that printer or he should move to the place of other printers to execute his print job there. Therefore, there are such disadvantages that the user's waiting time is wasted and the plurality of printers cannot be effectively used.
Patent Reference 1 discloses a system for transmitting print jobs from a plurality of information processing devices to an image forming device to execute the print jobs. The system calculates the time necessary for completing each of the print jobs included in the printing queue of the image forming device based on the printing time of each of the printing jobs, and notifies the time to the information processing devices.
Patent Reference 1: Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open under No. 2004-348401